Budget and supplies (i.e. THE PLAN)
We’ve recently completed our modeling and simulation contract with the US Air Force with tremendous success. It’ll give us time to pursue the sailboat project…among many other cool things. The shop is slowly but surely coming together. As mentioned before we have the drill press and the sander. Now we need some wood, glue, fasteners, etc. - not to mention a band saw - to start building the molds.
The game plan is to use Solidworks to generate several closely spaced frame section templates for the various sailboat components in order to accurately build male plugs. We will then build shells of the various components using a wet lay-up of either E-glass/epoxy or graphite/epoxy composite (depending on cost)…which will result in a very lightweight and stiff sailboat model with very clean lines. We will add stiffeners and electronics per the design, which we can’t share with you just yet ;-)
The past months have seen a lot of growth within the company and the local Dallas office. They’ve both doubled in size! We’ve had tremendous success using our modeling and simulation tools to generate high fidelity simulations and realistic visualizations. Our successes have the added benefit of enabling us to refine the sailboat design. We will use our simulation tools to predict and validate various design parameters to maximize the sailboat’s speed and controllability. The goal of the scale model is to demonstrate the concept and the feasibility of building and sailing a full size version. But for fun and because we can, we are considering competing in this autonomous transatlantic sailboat race. The results from last year’s race off of Aberystwyth, UK, can be found here:
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